"Dear Ubuntu, for the last couple years life has been good. Every time I've shown you to a friend or family member, they've compared you to what they're familiar with--Windows XP or Vista, mostly--and by comparison you've looked brilliant. Yeah, your ugly brown color scheme was a bit off-putting at first, but once people saw how secure, simple, and reliable you were, the response was almost universally positive. But recently, things have changed ..."

As an example printer management software would benefit from being able to automatically download and install printer drivers when we connect a new unknown printer.

The printer drivers are already installed for Ubuntu. For the most part, all you have to do is plug in the printer, and 20 seconds later it will be ready to print.

There are only about a dozen printer drivers for Linux, AFAIK. Myriad different models of printers are handled by different configuration files that delineate the differences in models for one or other of the dozen drivers. This configuartion file is typically a "PPD" file, a plain text file describing the underlying printer driver language and the unique properties of a given model.

That is beside the point, even if all available printer drivers are preinstalled by default in Ubuntu, software installation is still something an application should be able to request in a standardized distro independent fashion.

Users should never be given messages like "Software X is not installed" if the software is known, the message should read "Software X is not installed,would you like met to install it for you?" To make this kind of functionality easy to develop there need to be a standard way to install software, and PackageKit provide such a standard way.

If there is a standard way to install things, why should developers need to learn two ways to package software. As long as we have two common ways to install software nobody is even going to address the even bigger problem of having a standard naming scheeme for all the packages that make up LSB, and as long as this is the case it will be too expensive to port software to Linux in many cases, as the market share simply is too small.